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bioart : The battle of technology-vs-technology
Posted by horatio on Monday, May 17, 2010 (17:57:06) (46 reads)
Two interesting stories I ran across today.
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bioart : Mushroom Art Project - Phase II
Posted by horatio on Sunday, March 14, 2010 (01:53:16) (89 reads)
Well, my Parson's class project has moved into Phase II, the actual implementation phase. My two mushroom spawn blocks arrived on Thursday the 11th, and I put everything into go mode today. One block is Peal Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus var. columbinus) spawned on a straw substrate, while the other is Shiitake mushrooms (Lentinula edodes) spawned on a sawdust substrate.
I decided to let these two blocks fruit out at least through the first or second flush, at which point I will separate the blocks into chunks and add into a new substrate (cardboard, burlap and coffee rounds) to insert into my burlap goddess sculpture, as well as at least one other sculpture which I have not decided on yet. Perhaps another burlap sculpture for consistency and ease? We'll see. I'm pasting a link below to some of the photos of the work in progress, as well as some of the supplies and raw materials which will be a part of this project.
Flickr Mushroom Art Project slideshow
I've been spending a lot of time reading through various mushroom cultivation and growing books, online blogs with mushroom growers and enthusiasts, as well as some more technical books, like the Fungal Biology textbook.
The next step I am trying to work out is the media and design side, esp. looking into trying to animate some of the process visually, esp. in relation to the mycelial growth and running. I've found a few really neat inspirations so far, but nothing that is exactly what I want, so the search continues...
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bioart : Dissecting Kac and Transgenic Art
Posted by horatio on Wednesday, March 03, 2010 (22:18:06) (98 reads)
In watching some of the videos and reading some of the articles circulating almost a decade ago over Alba, Eduardo Kac's gfp enhanced rabbit, and also trying to put that into dialogue with the Leonardo's Choice readings and videos from the UCLA event, a number of pressing questions came to mind. In particular, the questions about ethics and rights that were raised by Steven Best and Carol Gigliotti. But even more than that, the underlying question that we tend to ask a lot in my field, which is what work does this project do? With that in mind, I want to explore a few threads relevant for our class.
Carol Gigliotti writes in her opening to Leonardo's Choice that:
Unlike the majority of discussions on biotechnology, whether endorsing or critical, this volume, as a whole, views seriously the disastrous impact of these technologies on animals themselves. Amidst the wealth of human intelligence and imagination invested in the development of technologies, the natural world and non-human beings have been regulated to proprietary roles, even though our technological innovations could not exist without them. Our long-standing pre-occupation with technological outlooks and technological solutions have obscured the reality and agency of the more-than-human world, or what is left of it.
Gigliotti points to three key moments, following Italian philosopher Paola Cavalieri's trail, which have left a historical imprint in the form of a human-animal binary. These are:
The Greek separation of humans and animals in the polis (cf. Plato's city of pigs).
Descartes notion of mechanistic action and the animal autonomata.
The current techno-industrialization (what Haraway calls 'technoscience') of animals in society.
But Gigliotti argues that the biotech revolution is a new 4th destructive moment for animals, in part because it has the potential to undermine the advances in animal rights and concern for animal welfare, as well as the deeper metaphysical changes in public thinking towards animals, by a re-instrumentalization of the animal as object of science. We can see this in a few different places:
"It is also true and needs to be articulated clearly that the current goals of Western science and technology, bound up as they are with entrenched ideas of animals and nature existing solely for our use, are antithetical to these challenges and are still driving the development of “transformative” biotechnologies." (Gigliotti xiv)
"This collection’s central questions revolve around how Western ideas and practices of creative freedom are disassociated from the impacts they have on the non-human world. This disassociation has contributed to shifting an organic understanding of nature to a mechanistic model in which the image of the non-human world is one of an (mere) inert, soulless machine and in which the agency of animals is obscured." (Gigliotti xiv)
"Animals have been conscripted into these technologies to further an agenda of controlling the creation of all life through the manipulation of various manifestations of code. In today’s biotechnologies, animals have become code." (Gigliotti xvii)
This is where I think a lot of the concern over Kac's work really centers. What work is Kac "trying to do" with his art? Well, here's what he has said in the past about the gfp bunny in context:
"Transgenic art, I proposed elsewhere, is a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism, to create unique living beings. This must be done with great care, with acknowledgment of the complex issues thus raised and, above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life thus created."
The "GFP Bunny" project is a complex social event that starts with the creation of a chimerical animal that does not exist in nature (i.e., "chimerical" in the sense of a cultural tradition of imaginary animals, not in the scientific connotation of an organism in which there is a mixture of cells in the body)."
As I read this, he is basically taking a scientific practice build around and upon animal exploitation and trying to claim a liberatory artistic potential by pointing to how it can help to open up "complex issues" and perhaps also foster "care" and a vague and unstated "commitment" to the life under the genetic knife. But I don't buy it, not completely, and not on the most fundamental point--ethics. Nowhere in Kac's writing about Alba, or in his other writings on transgenetic art, do I see a real awareness that his ability to even make these transgenic art projects is premised on the acceptance of both animal exploitation and the violability of animal life compared to the human. Sure, he talks about the love he has for Alba, even if he/she? remains locked up in a French biotech lab, while he is busy making money and fame at the expense of this rabbit, nor does he ever acknowledge his perpetuation of animal experimentation as an acceptable practice, even though he wants to claim awareness of the fact. This was really brought home to me in one line in particular of his, where he states:
"I decided to proceed with the project because it became clear that it was safe...Put another way: green fluorescent protein is harmless to the rabbit. It is also important to point out that the "GFP Bunny" project breaks no social rule: humans have determined the evolution of rabbits for at least 1400 years." (GFP Bunny)
The gfp bunny project may not break any social rules if we assume that animal exploitation and experimentation is the norm (which it is), and we also accept that human manipulation of animals for "at least 1400 years" has been the norm (also true), but this completely misses the ethical question of whether these "social rules" are themselves acceptable. Many would say no, absolutely not. And that's the real rub with Kacs, he wants to have his animal friendly-lovey dovey story--and eat his gfp bunny too. But you can't have it both ways. Either the experimentation and manipulation of animals is ethically suspect, or it is ethically acceptable, and where and how that line gets drawn is precisely what he claims to want to interrogate and have a dialogue about, but at the very moment when his own project asks that question, he avoids it, or rather, he falls back into the old anthropocentric trope of, "well we've done this before, so it must be ok to keep doing it." That is not an ethically defensible position, it is an excuse that precisely avoids having to deal with the ethical problems before you.
Now in fairness to Kac, he does respond to this charge, but I find his defense equally lacking. Here's what he says about his project compared to standard genetics or animal breeding programs:
"GFP Bunny" is a transgenic artwork and not a breeding project. The differences between the two include the principles that guide the work, the procedures employed, and the main objectives. Traditionally, animal breeding has been a multi-generational selection process that has sought to create pure breeds with standard form and structure, often to serve a specific performative function. As it moved from rural milieus to urban environments, breeding de-emphasized selection for behavioral attributes but continued to be driven by a notion of aesthetics anchored on visual traits and on morphological principles. Transgenic art, by contrast, offers a concept of aesthetics that emphasizes the social rather than the formal aspects of life and biodiversity, that challenges notions of genetic purity, that incorporates precise work at the genomic level, and that reveals the fluidity of the concept of species in an ever increasingly transgenic social context." (GFP Bunny)
I grant that his project is not about breeding (whether the French lab maintains that same view is a different story), but again his claim to the "principles that guide the work" being different are hard to square, given the ethical problem just outlined above. As far as procedures involved, as far as I can tell the actual, technical science that occurred to make Alba is exactly the same as any other genetic experiment for breeding or trait selection, it just happens that he was engineering Albe to express the gfp gene, rather than say hair sheen or fur color. But the procedures are identical.
He also makes a clever but deceptive semantic slip here by moving from transgenic experimentation to animal breeding in the same sentence, asking us to see how his process is not like traditional multi-generational breeding programs, but that was never a point of debate. We know he didn't "design" Alba for breeding, so to say what he is doing is not like that is to setup a straw man argument which he can easily knock down. The question is the transgenetic process, not the breeding process, and we should not lose sight of that as he seems to hope we will do. The reason I think he makes this claim is because he immediately wants to say that breeding is usually for "a specific performative function," whereas his project is somehow different. I'm not sure that is a claim he can really defend. If anything, I see a gfp bunny as the ultimate in performative function. After all, doesn't Alba function in a performative framework precisely because the rabbit's functions is a symbolic chimera demonstrating the potential of art and science to be fused? This sure seems to be what Kac is claiming when he says:
"As a transgenic artist, I am not interested in the creation of genetic objects, but on the invention of transgenic social subjects." (GFP Bunny)
Here I have to disagree that Alba has been constituted as a social subject. If anything, based on all of the media coverage and attention around Kac and Alba, this social process seems to further reify Alba as a mute object of Kac's artistic creativity. While he may not be "interested" in creating genetic objects, I would argue that is precisely what he accomplished in the form of Alba. To talk about Alba as a subject is to mythologize what he wanted Alba to be, not what Alba really is. While we can surely argue that Alba as a living and sentient subject should be able to engage as a transgenic social subject in these debates, when it comes to actually observing that process playing out, all we find is an absent referent--a silently glowing albino bunny held captive in an animal research lab--and not a true subject. This reality becomes all the harder to swallow when Kacs says things like the following:
"Integrating the lessons of dialogical philosophy and cognitive ethology, transgenic art must promote awareness of and respect for the spiritual (mental) life of the transgenic animal. The word "aesthetics" in the context of transgenic art must be understood to mean that creation, socialization, and domestic integration are a single process. The question is not to make the bunny meet specific requirements or whims, but to enjoy her company as an individual (all bunnies are different), appreciated for her own intrinsic virtues, in dialogical interaction." (GFP Bunny)
It's pretty language, and sounds great, but the reality tells a very different story. Where is the respect for the spiritual life of a rabbit who is the object of genetic manipulation and the subject of forced confinement, when all the aesthetic talk dies down? And that he misses this very aesthetic fulcrum--the point he tries to make so forcefully about intrinsic bunny value--is the saddest part. When he says that "creation, socialization, and domestic integration are a single process," he seems to be talking about the single process of life as an object of transgenic lab experimentation, not a social subject in its own right. And it is the lack of recognition by Kac that this all occurs as a single process, from lab experimentation to media hype, capturing Alba in the gaze of society as transgenic spectacle, which makes it all the more maddening. How else could you explain an artistic comment like the following not sounding amazingly naive and trite:
"Today, our ability to generate life through the direct method of genetic engineering prompts a re-evaluation of the cultural objectification and the personal subjectification of animals, and in so doing it renews our investigation of the limits and potentialities of what we call humanity." (GFP Bunny)
While I may applaud Kac's creativity and desire to engage in these critical issues, I worry that he does more harm than good in the process. And if his more recent projects like "Edunia" are any indication, I still think he is missing the boat in his attempt at transgenic artistic critique. Similarly, exhibits like Damien Hirst's Away From The Flock seem to be stranded in the same boat as Kac. After all, what happened to Kac's beloved Alba ten years out?
On a somewhat related but different not, something which Steve Best mentions in his essay, how do these debates change when the animals in question die or are dead, like in Jessica Joslin's mouse bioart sculptures?
Links:
GFP Bunny
Natural History of the Enigma (Kac's transgenic Petunia exhibit from 2009)
Making Edunia
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